Rick Scott says Helene shows ‘the climate is clearly changing’

Image via AP.

Though the concept of climate change has been removed from state law in recent months, Florida’s former Governor is saying he agrees with mainstream scientists on the issue.

“The climate is clearly changing,” U.S. Sen. Rick Scott said on CNN, addressing the destruction left by Hurricane Helene.

“We know things are changing. We’ve got to figure out, how do we react to that?” Scott added, answering host Dana Bash’s inquiries about the subject.

Scott cited storm surge as a compounding problem.

“It seems like what’s happening is the storm surge is getting worse. I mean, we had over 10 foot of storm surge in the Big Bend,” Scott said. “That’s a massive amount of water.”

The Senator wasn’t finished, saying again “who knows what the reason is, but something is changing” to create “massive storm surge.”

Scott has accepted the concept of climate change in recent years, but his conversion was gradual, as those with long memories of his career know.

The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting (FCIR) notes that in 2015, there were allegations from former state officials that “climate change” and other related terms were banned in the Executive Office of the Governor.

“We were told not to use the terms ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or ‘sustainability,’” said Christopher Byrd, an attorney with the Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) Office of General Counsel until 2013. “That message was communicated to me and my colleagues by our superiors in the Office of General Counsel.”

Others corroborated Byrd’s claim that “climate change” and “global warming” were forbidden, including staffers in Tallahassee and workers throughout the state.

While Scott’s own staff said there was “no policy” on this in response to reporters’ inquiries at the time, the FCIR report noted that the term had been stripped from environmental reports in favor of phrasings like “climate drivers” and “climate-driven changes.” Other anecdotes reinforced the strong impression that the phrases were rejected by the administration at the time.

“Sea-level rise” eventually became permitted, Reuters notes, though “coastal resiliency” was the preferred euphemism for that for some time.

Other documents, such as one from the DEP, alluded to the concept.

“Both natural and anthropogenic (man-made) processes contribute to changes in global weather patterns such as temperature, rainfall, snowfall and wind,” read the agency’s website during the Scott era.

“These changes have been observed throughout earth’s history, but with the onset of the industrial revolution and the human population explosion, increases in the intensity of climate changes associated with human activities have been reported with growing frequency.”

However, Scott as Governor was coy about the phrase when asked directly, choosing non-answers like “I’m not a scientist” through much of his time in Tallahassee. He paid for that in the 2018 campaign, with Democrats pressing the case that he was a “denier” of climate change with investments in companies opposed to anti-pollution regulations.

Since going to the Senate, Scott has gotten more comfortable with the phrasing itself. He said “climate change is real” in 2019, during a floor speech blasting the so-called Green New Deal. An NPR interview from 2021 found him using the phrase “impacts of climate change” a few times.

But the evolution was years in the making.